Fluid Socio-Technical (Trans)formation of an AI system

Abstract

The paper applies a flow-oriented perspective to examine how temporal conditioning of the flows of people and digital technologies dynamically shape socio-technical formation and the transformation process of an AI (artificial intelligence) system. Drawing on an in-depth case study of a financial accounting services company that was developing and deploying an AI system in its work process enabled forming a flow-based genealogical account of the fluid process of socio-technical (trans)formation. This allows to explore how delays to AI system deployment can arise from impediments to the dynamics of creation, sensing, and undergoing of possibilities for action wherein the flows of practices and actions involved cannot reach favorable conditions to form correspondence along the (trans)formative system-development path.